Originally Posted by
firebane
Western Digital, Samsung, and Maxtor if you don't care about your data
Seagate if you want reliability and long life and do care about your data.
Hard drive changing is easy, but with you what I'd suggest is simply make your old 80gb a slave drive and put a new 250 or 350gb drive as master and re-install Windows and call it a day.
I wouldn't say Maxtor or WD are bad drives at all. I have run them for years and only once have I had an issue with one of them which was a Maxtor laptop drive that fried on me.
Now people who don't know shit about running regular maintenence on their drives might see a few more issue with long seek times or corrupted file. Of course I run a cleanup only once a month or less and do a lot of writing and rewriting to my drives and have a decent amount set aside as scratch disc/virtual memory too.